Overview
What is Nucleo?
Nucleo is a decentralized shared liquidity layer that allows users to interact with DeFi protocols from their preferred native chains across all VMs (EVM, SVM, MoveVM, FuelVM, etc). For users, the experience is similar to interacting with a native smart contract/program on their preferred chain, but they get the added benefit of being able to access liquidity that exists on all other chains as well without ever needing to bridge assets. This enables highly efficient DeFi - whether it's swapping tokens on the same chain, swapping tokens cross-chain, providing liquidity in a pool, lending or borrowing, and so on.
What Nucleo is NOT
Nucleo is not...
- a chain
- a bridge
- a wrapper
- a single DeFi application
Why Nucleo?
The future of DeFi is multichain. Ethereum pioneered smart contracts and DeFi, but there has been an exponential growth in the number of Layer 2 EVM chains as well as alternative VMs, such as Solana, Move, Fuel, StarkNet, and so on. Each chain brings along its own set of advantages - and users are split across the entire ecosystem by being active where they are most accepting of the benefits.
However, this comes with a problem. The fragmentation of users across chains creates a fragmentation of liquidity. Ethereum leads the way with the largest liquidity pools, but an increasingly high number of users do not wish to transact on Ethereum due to high gas fees. But, while other chains can offer lower gas fees, they often suffer from having significantly smaller liquidity available for DeFi applications which forces them to either bridge assets back to Ethereum or take the hit of participating in an inefficient market.
The goal of Nucleo is to allow for the creation of DeFi protocols and applications that can be accessed on any chain while being able to share the liquidity that exists among them. Users have access to the same amount of liquidity regardless of what chain they are operating on, so they can confidently choose to operate on a chain they align themselves with rather than being forced to operate on one that has a higher amount of liquidity available.
This also means that a new chain can integrate with Nucleo and instantly get access to a large amount of liquidity it inherits from chains previously integrated with Nucleo and provide a seamless experience for users without needing to rebuild liquidity pools from scratch through complex incentive mechanisms and still end up having worse liquidity than Ethereum.
Vision
The goal of building Nucleo is to fix the following major problems that exist today:
- Liquidity fragmentation across chains
- Native fee token differentiation across chains
- Lack of cross-chain protocols beyond Ethereum and its L2s
- Requirement of bridging to access liquidity on another chain
- Significant developer overhead to deploy a protocol to a new VM
Nucleo aims to eliminate these problems and provide new solutions to enable efficient and seamless DeFi across the multichain ecosystem, while letting users operate on their chain of choice.
Access liquidity on all chains at one price.